[M]any The Master
said, He
who sets
to work on a different strand destroys the whole
fabric.
---Confucius, Analects II.
16.
The task of the modern
educator
is not
to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.
The right defense
against
false sentiments is to inculcate just
sentiments....
The Chinese also speak of
a great
thing
(the greatest thing) called the Tao.
It is the reality
beyond
all predicates, the abyss that was before the
Creator Himself. It
is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the
Way in which the
universe
goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly
emerge, stilly and
tranquilly,
into space and time. It is also the Way which
every man should
tread
in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic
progression, conforming all
activity to that great exemplar....
This conception in all its
forms,
Platonic,
Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike,
I shall henceforth
refer to for brevity simply as 'the Tao..."
This thing which I have
called
for convenience
the Tao, and which others may call Natural
Law or Traditional
Morality
or the First Principles of Practical Reason, is not
one among a series
of possible systems of value. It is the sole
source of all value
judgements. If it is rejected, all value is
rejected....
There are progressions in
which
the last
step is sui generis--incommensurable with
the others--and in
which
to go the whole way is to undo all the labour of
your previous
journey.
To reduce the Tao to a mere natural product
is a step of that
kind.
Up to that point, the kind of explanation which
explains thing away
might
give us something, though at a heavy cost. But
you cannot go on
'explaining
away' for ever: you will find that you have
explained explanation
itself
away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things
for ever.
The
whole point of seeing through something is to see
through it. It
is good that the window should be transparent,
because the street or
garden
beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through
the garden too?
It is no use trying to 'see through' first
principles. If you see
through everything, then everything is
transparent. But a wholly
transparent world is an invisible world. To
'see through' all
things
is the same as not to see.
---C. S. Lewis, The
Abolition
of Man
(1947).
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